Posts Tagged ‘how-to’

Building a finance blog is easy. Building a popular finance blog is a lot harder. The Internet is full of them, big and small, and while it is simpler than ever to create one, it is getting harder to be noticed in the sea of sites available – especially in a niche where many will turn first to official financial sources like the Wall Street Journal or MSNBC.

But difficult doesn’t translate into impossible, by any means. You don’t have to worry about competing in the beginning. Instead, what you have to be focused on is knowing how to generate a high traffic site by taking baby steps toward that end. That can be done in several key ways that are less complicated than you might think.

Accept That It Can Take a While

Time is the key ingredient to any blog’s success. You can’t just expect to put up a couple of posts and have everyone flock to see them. There is content to build, and there are connections to make, reblogs to receive andmarketing tactics to try. Even just leaving it there while you continue to add more content will work, but again, it all takes time.

Blogging has so many uses in business and social arenas. Businesses use blogging to increase web traffic and awareness about a company, product or service. Others use blogging to keep their friends and family informed about their lives. Blogging on a Blackberry device has never been simpler. New applications have increased the ability to blog. Blackberry SIM cards make it easy to select new plans while keeping applications stored on the Blackberry device. Read More

Reviews are one of the best types of post for a blog. If done well, they are very search-friendly, extremely useful to your readers and can be great conversation starters for building comments.

However, a review done poorly can be a pretty big mess. Not only can it create a great deal of needless controversy and headache, but it can actually discredit your site and, in extreme cases, create legal troubles.

Though angry and misanthropic reviews are all the rage in many circles, especially with older video games and movies, they are primarily comedy shows that aren’t intended to give a true review of the content. Most people, in those cases, know the subject material to be bad, it’s just a matter of how much so.

Writing a review for the purpose of informing and drawing conclusions can, at times, be a delicate act but pulling it off is one that your readers will appreciate. Balanced, thorough and honest reviews are still surprisingly rare on the Web and when people are making purchasing decisions, they seek those out.

So how do you make sure your review actually helps your readers? The answer is to plan it out carefully and take the time to do ensure you have everything you need inside. Read More

For a project I am involved with we recently considered merging 2 rather large WordPress blogs. These were 2 blogs with several thousands entries and posts and at least 20 authors have written on those blogs over the years. The combined blog would have more than 10,000 entries and more than 40,000 comments.

In this post I am going to walk you trough the whole process, because it is simpler than it sounds and should not scare anyone away. Depending on how ‘hardcore’ you, the merger could be done in some hours only. Yes, some hours only.

Getting Started

Although this tutorial is aimed at both ‘beginners’ and ‘pros’, I assume that you have a certain basic knowledge, understanding from WordPress and setup already:

You know how to backup a database;

You know how to FTP;

You have a localhost setup;

You have a basic understanding of WordPress database tables, ie. when I mention wp_options, you know that this is a database table and you know how to ‘find’ this table;

You know how to make changes to the database

The walkthrough is also based on both blogs running a similar permalink structure and using the same plugins. Read More

If you work, either full time or part time, for a company that might benefit from having a someone running a blog for them(and it would be extremely strange if that isn’t the case), you might be able to roll some blogging into your job, or maybe even make blogging for that company your ONLY job if that’s something you’d enjoy.

Itâ€™s not realistic â€“ or even a good idea â€“ for every employed person in the world to have a blog. For one thing, the blogosphere is cluttered enough as it is, and blogs that have no real purpose for existence will just muck things up even more. You should write a blog because you have a unique opinion on an industry issue and can establish yourself as a credible expert. Hone your perspective by reading literature and other blogs in your field and determining where thereâ€™s an unmet need.

Of course, that’s just the first step, you’ll have to head over to the full article for the other 5, and they are worth the couple of minutes it’ll take you to read them if you’re at all interested in convincing your employer to let you (or even pay you) to blog about the company you’re working for.